I Hope You Use a Responsive WordPress Theme

There is a major shift in the web taking place towards responsive design. I wouldn’t want you to be late to this swell party so I decided to do a series of posts on responsive web design. This is the first part in the series with the focus being responsive WordPress themes.

Regular visitors to the HTML5 Blog may have already noticed that the blog has been acting responsively for some time. I decided to go with a responsive WordPress theme for several reasons. The first and only reason that matters is because in 2012, responsive design is good design. Having to setup and maintain unique blog designs for users on mobile phones, users on tablets, and users on everything else is ridiculous. It makes me want to pull your hair out. Yes, your hair. Why would I pull out mine? It hurts when I do that.

Many of you probably don’t want to take the time to learn how to create a responsive WordPress theme from scratch. I understand. There are wonderful plug and play options for you. WooThemes has some of the easiest to use responsive WordPress themes out there. I recommend the latest version of their blog theme called Canvas as well as their SMPL theme. I have purchased both of those themes and enjoyed playing around with them. Another option is to find a fast loading, responsive WordPress theme on ThemeForest. I looked around myself and would probably try one of the SuperSkeleton WordPress Themes by Epicera. The fact that his lastest responsive theme loads in under 0.5 seconds has me thinking twice about my blog theme.

This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design. But how?